I picked myself up from the floor and brushed myself down. Clay looked at me. “What do you want to do with him, Captain? Throw him out the airlock?”

I massaged my jaw. Nobody knew what happened to bodies ejected from ships in the hypervoid. If we put Childe in a suit and pushed him into the howling emptiness, he might fall through it forever, endlessly tumbling: an eternal monument to his own stupidity.

“Tempting as it might be, we can’t murder an agent of Conglomeration Intelligence.” My hands began to shake. I squeezed them into fists. For some stupid reason, I felt like laughing.

“Then what are we going to do with him?” Clay asked.

From her chair, Petrushka poked Childe’s shoulder with the rubber tip of her crutch. “Let me try talking to him, when he wakes.” She frowned. “If he wakes.”

I swallowed back the giggle in my throat. “And if that doesn’t work?”

Clay turned to me. “I’ll go get my Archipelago pistol, chief. Bastard makes one wrong move, I’ll blow a hole through him.”

I shook my head, feeling a little giddy. “No, no murders.”

“Then what do you want me to do, tie him up?”

I gave a snort. “Something along those lines.” I turned my attention to the avatar on the screen. “Ship, get Nod up here.” With the toe of my boot, I nudged the tangled form of the sedated agent. “And tell him to bring a welding torch.”

Thirty-One: Nod

THIRTY-ONE

NOD

Leave nest and climb to galley, they say.

Bring gear.

Climb up three decks and no one says thank you.

And galley stinks of human food. Meat and vegetables printed from organic ink. Recycled a million times. Stupid omnivores. They have lost their connection to the World Tree. They have forgotten what they are. And so they fight and strive and overcome their niche. They construct ships with innards as challenging to maintain as the fibres of the World Tree. Ships like Hound of Difficulty.

And I work and maintain.

And I build nest and sleep.

Good nest.

And then they say, “Nod, can you come up to the galley and bring a welding rig?” And when I get there, they ask me to weld male human to deck.

Male human stinks of narcotics. Smell comes from pores. Brains scrambled like churned-up riverbed.

Place welds at every joint of spindly body. Ankles, knees, hips, elbows, wrists. Fix metal and carbon-fibre skeleton in place, so meat can’t move.

Stupid omnivores.

They have lost their niche. They only care for power and territory, as if somehow that makes up for losing comfort of knowing World Tree.